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Based on the current trend, he said if the nation had to reach $ 80 billion, it would have to multiply the workforce eight times, which might not make the Indian operations competitive. Hence the software industry had to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that would sweep the world.

PUNE, May 28

"MY belief is that relying only on software, may not be the best strategy for the future. India should emerge as not only a "software industry" but as an "ICT industry" with equal strength in software, hardware, embedded systems design, integration, and total end-to-end solutions,'' said Dr A. P.J. Abdul Kalam, President, while dedicating the I2IT (isquareit), in Hinjewadi near here to the nation.

Giving his address at the institute, he said today the software industry in the country was nearly $10 billion strong, with a flat domestic market of $2 billion contributing 16 per cent of nation's exports.

"While in the next two decades, we should aim at the nation's GDP to be doubled, the software industry's contribution is expected to increase at least 10 folds. Software and hardware industries will become a formidable component of the nation's wealth,'' he said.

Dr Kalam pointed out that the Government, industry and the academia could take this issue of increasing the domestic IT segment through strong and sustainable use of IT for education and healthcare by bringing out a roadmap.

He said the IT industry and economic growth employing 5,00,000 people earned $10 billion, which was less than one per cent of the world market, from another perspective. At the same time a typical international software company with 50,000 employees earned $ 20 billion through its worldwide operations, he said.

Based on the current trend, he said if the nation had to reach $ 80 billion, it would have to multiply the workforce eight times, which might not make the Indian operations competitive. Hence the software industry had to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that would sweep the world.

"A country which has seen what is networking of talents to make more than 20,000 man year projects in satellites, fighter aircraft, launch vehicles, atomic energy and missiles, can certainly think of networking of talents in our industry, research laboratories and the academia. This will ensure emergence of many Indian multinationals that would bring per capita revenues almost 10 times higher than what we do today,'' he said. Today, out of the Fortune 500 companies, 260 are Indian clients. "When we march towards a developed India, I would like the IT industry to lead the march by proclaiming that "260 of the Fortune 500 companies are Indian MNCs. This is my dream,'' he said.

Dr Kalam said the future challenge in IT included the issues related to software security. The industry would have to look for open source codes so that it could easily introduced to users to build security algorithms. "In India, open source code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people. I2IT has to play a major role in this national mission,'' he said.

He said one of the ingredients to become a developed nation was that its languages must also be developed in a digital era. The optimum use of IT would come when a user searched for a particular question, the answer should be given to the user in the same language. That means we must have search engines, word processing tools, optical character recognisers, speech recognisers, automatic summarisers, and machine translators.

He said isquareit should take on the job of development of language technologies, particularly the Indian languages. Market potential existed in the country in the area of tele-education, tele-medicine, infotainment and e-governance needed to be given business, he added.

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